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Gamification Grows Up to Become a CEO's Best Friend

Gamification sometimes brings to mind ancillary activities such as earning points on a consumer web site or getting to a new level of expertise in online communities. But a new wave of gamification is underway, one that is focused on creating a deeper understanding of what makes a business successful. It’s not about “virtual” points, but hard-dollar revenue.

Game mechanics, such as activity points, real-time monitoring of progress, rewards, missions for individuals and groups, virtual goods, and other such devices are part of this new wave. But now these mechanics are not the star of the show. They are tools for answering questions such as:

Who are our top performers?

What do they do to achieve success?

What activities lead prospects to buy more?

What activities lead partners to sell more?

How can high performance techniques be widely adopted?

The next wave of gamification is not about games. It is about understanding business processes. In essence, gamification, applied to the enterprise, is an improved and flexible form of business process management (BPM), one that offers a new way to understand and optimize business processes.

Gamification is for kids, for generation X, Y, and Z, for the digital natives, and it is for grown-ups too.

“We started out doing consumer facing applications, but we have realized that applying gamification inside the four walls of a business is a massive opportunity,” said Jim Scullion, CEO of Bunchball. “Whenever using an application effectively or performing an activity consistently to a high standard is crucial to business success, gamification can help. That’s why CEOs should be interested. Gamification is an excellent way to effect and sustain change.”

Gamification is about achieving goals using an engaging set of metrics-based interactions. It takes something usually seen in hindsight–performance–and breaks it down, looking at its most important component parts. Once performance is measured, participants can begin getting immediate feedback. Gamification can actually become an integral part of process design for a business, moving well beyond a clever way to hook twenty-something social media users.

Put yourself in the place of a manager who’s trying to improve the performance of his unit and his management style and measure results in a quantifiable way. Gamification gets right to the heart of it.

In other words, unlike a traditional BPM process, in which everything is mapped out in a step-by-step process flow, optimizing a process via gamification attempts to identify the key steps that lead to success. If making a large amount of outbound calls is key to success for a sales rep, then that is tracked. If lines of code checked in by a developer is important, that should be tracked. At first, some activities that are crucial to succes may be obvious. But as you identify top performers, you can look at what they do that is different from everyone else. What are their tricks, their “secret sauce”? Once you know the answer to that question, you can codify and track that behavior for everyone, and reward it. Gamification is not a one-time event. It’s an ongoing process of understanding what works.

In an ordinary review process, the employee is hauled in to the office, presented with metrics from the last quarter, and rewarded with a bonus, or sent off with a new set of goals for improvement. While these goals can be, and are presented in the aggregate to the team through whiteboards, intranets, and meetings, generally people try to achieve them in isolation.

With gamification, that changes; leader boards, goals, incentives, and rewards can all be seen and interacted with in a shared forum. “Missions” can be created for groups, regions, or business units, defined by specific tasks, which, when completed, deliver specific rewards, which can be visible to others. It’s one thing to have someone meet a goal and cash in a coupon to order a MacBook Air online; it’s quite another for all of the people in his department to know that he hit his goal and is now ordering a sweet new computer. The naturally competitive fires in people can be stoked by the open display of their peers’ goal attainment and subsequent rewards. The incentives don’t have to be as tangible or expensive as laptop; for smaller goals, a simple acknowledgment can go a long way.

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Gamification in the business environment is much needed. Employees complain about boring training sessions with materials that end up in the trash can and the mindless e-learning sessions that are taken minutes before the completion deadline. Now business professionals can finally learn from doing. BankersLab just launched CreditLab, a training product using gamification for credit risk management professionals.

Excellent article, Dan. Can you share more on the virtual and real goods companies are using to drive adoption and compliance with their gamification efforts?

To share our experience, we encourage clients to have fun with rewards (and consequences) that fit with their culture…and we’re convinced they don’t have to cost much (especially after one of our clients shared a quote from Napoleon, something to the effect of “Men will give their lives for a ribbon and piece of tin.”

Rewards… - Rotate a real-life, gaudy, gold trophy around the office to the high scorer each week - Announce the high scorer in the weekly call or newsletter - Create a special seat at the weekly meeting for the top performer - Give a ceremonial duty to the high scorer, like the right to say or do something special at will - Give a choice parking spot to the high scorer - Play a theme song for the top performer over the speakers in the office when that person arrives at the office (everyone chooses their theme song at the outset of the competition)

Light-hearted Consequences (just don’t take these too seriously!) - Give the low scorer a silly trophy, like a talking large mouth bass, a boot, or a decorated box of mac & cheese - Require the low scorer to clean out the fridge - Require the low scorer to open the weekly meeting with a 2 min standup comedy routine or song

My company designs and delivers game mechanics on behalf of our clients, and we have a different take on ‘gamification’ that what’s expressed in this column by Rajat and echoed by Dan. The Gamification folks define play as a primarily heads-down activity. To paraphrase Jane McGonigal, the movement’s Joan of Arc, “spending two more hours a day playing computer games can solve the world’s problems.”

Our take is that the challenges and opportunities faced by most businesses and their managers are not, in fact, heads-down issues. They are ‘heads-up,’ human issues that cannot be resolved algorithmically, inside the brain of a machine. They must be confronted on a human scale. There’s a name for a company whose managers keep their finger on the pulse of performance by reading output from machines: sweatshops. And it doesn’t matter whether you call the output the results of a game or not.

There are three areas where Gamification, in its curent iteration, is too heads-down

It does not distinguish between Objectives and Outcomes. Computer games are set up to be won. Or lost. Winning–by scoring more points or vanquishing one’s opponents–is the objective. Yet most of the value of play resides not in achieving the objectives of a game but in the outcomes it generates. And most of the outcomes are unexpected.

It cannot keep pace with the speed of change in the business environment. Figure it takes a manager one quarter to decide on a Gamification strategy. Another quarter to design the game and a third quarter before results of the game are known. That’s 9 months of marketplace evolution during which the business environment will have changed significantly. There’s a word for a manager who waits 9 months to respond to market fluidity: unemployed.

Finally, Gamification does not, IMO, respect brand narratives, which, in a networked world, are co-created with customers. By locking into a quantification model, managers increase the probability that they’ll miss the fleeting opportunities, and ephemeral points of engagement with community that arise from customer dialogues, and can yield remarkable business outcomes.

These objections (and others) aside, I am a big believer in players like Rajat, and the Game Generation, and have faith that they hold the keys to energizing an organization or an economy. As long as they are given heads-up games to play.

Given the heads-up games of improvisation first conceived by Viola Spolin as a path to learning in multi- cultural teams (see gamechangers.com) or the ‘cooperative games’ espoused by Agile Development, these players can and will work wonders. Play on!